Vatican bioethics guidance condemns stem cell research

Document clarifies church's position on bioethical issues

December 13, 2008|By Manya A. Brachear, Tribune reporter

Applying its abiding ethic of life to modern medicine, the Vatican on Friday condemned genetic engineering and other innovations in biotechnology that have evolved since the introduction of in-vitro fertilization.

In a document on bioethics titled "Dignitas Personae," or "The Dignity of a Person," the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith offers the church's most concrete guidance to date on how to honor the dignity of human life and value of procreation in the 21st Century.

The instructions, released Friday, build on a similar document issued by the congregation in 1987 titled "Donum Vitae," or "The Gift of Life," which at the time addressed advances in artificial reproductive technologies and denounced in-vitro fertilization.

Since then, the fields of embryology and genetic engineering have advanced exponentially, including the breakthrough in embryonic stem cell research in 1998 and the mapping of the human genome, which identified the more than 20,000 genes in human DNA, between 1990 and 2003.

"These are massive discoveries, maybe on par with the discovery of the double helical structure of [James] Watson and [Francis] Crick," said James Walter, chairman of the bioethics institute at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, referring to the scientists who cracked the DNA code in 1953.

"The therapeutic outcome from these two discoveries could well surpass anything Watson and Crick envisioned. I don't think there's anything else on the horizon that the document would have been waiting for."

Moral questions associated with those innovations have also become the domain of courts and legislators.

Some Catholic theologians were surprised that the document did not prohibit hospitals from using the kind of emergency contraception that halts fertilization in cases of rape. And though the document denounced researchers who create embryos and use them as biological material to produce vaccines, it allowed parents to use those vaccines to protect their child's health, as long as they express their moral objection to their physician.

The document also stopped short of defining an embryo as a person, saying instead that the embryo has "from the very beginning, the dignity proper to a person."

"It doesn't take a final position on it," said Lisa Sowle Cahill, a theologian at Boston College. "Although it states it more strongly, it's still shy of an unequivocal endorsement."

The document also refrained from endorsing -- some even say it discouraged -- activists' efforts to implant in their own wombs embryos discarded after in-vitro fertilization. Yet the document also likened the destruction of those embryos to abortion.

In fact, it broadened the definition of abortion by classifying the "morning-after pill" and the drug RU-486, which blocks the action of hormones needed to keep a fertilized egg implanted in the uterus, "within the sin of abortion." It also denounced forms of artificial fertilization because they are substitutes for sexual intercourse.

Chicago's Cardinal Francis George welcomed the instruction as a helpful guide for theologians, medical personnel, researchers and married couples trying to plan families but grappling with the morality of miracles rendered possible by modern science.

"We applaud developments which advance medical progress with respect for the sanctity of human life from the moment of conception," George said in a statement Friday. "We oppose discarding or manipulating innocent lives to benefit future generations, or promoting the creation of new human life in depersonalized ways that substitute for the loving union between a husband and wife."

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mbrachear@tribune.com

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